Various methods for control of insertion devices have been devised. While many of these methods can work quite well, it has been found that these known methods require numerous significant control software configuration changes as a system configuration changes.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,709,482 to Nelson, et al describes a high speed document feeder using synchronous operation.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,825,251 discloses a system for controlling the feed of documents into and along a document path. The device can be made to operate synchronously if the longest document length is used to determine the maximum throughput or asynchronously in that the document by its own length may be used to determine the throughput rate. The lengths in the asynchronous mode are used to adjust the speeds of various rollers in the document path to determine the degree of inter-document spacing. This reference does not teach or suggest a method for dealing with changes in the configuration of the device.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,003,485 describes an asynchronous communication protocol for a collating and insertion device. U.S. Pat. No. 5,012,073 describes a card and mailer data inserter system which includes an operator means for manual override and a means for re-initiating automatic operation.